WordPress is a great solution for people in need of a website or blog, though installing WordPress can be a bit tricky. Luckily for many people, hosting providers are beginning to roll out one button installs of WordPress Joomla, Drupal and more. This is obviously the easiest way to go about doing this, which you can generally find in your hosting options. The down side of this is it can take quite awhile for them to be created, and let’s be honest, it’s just not as fun. The following example is using GoDaddy hosting, other hosting services may look a bit different.

To install a WordPress site yourself, you will need a few things: a hosting account, FTP access and a mysql database.

8. Once this is done, simply login to your ftp and upload the files to your web space. If you need to find your ftp information, you can do so through your hosting(similarto setting up your database)

9. Once all of your files are uploaded, visit the domain that you uploaded your files to(you may have to navigate to a subfolder if you put them there). You will then see a wordpress setup page in which you create your user name, password and email associated with the site.

Whether you’re a large e-commerce business or a small brick and mortar company, Social Media is a fantastic route to create exposure and grow a community around your brand. Adding Social Media icons to your website shouldn’t even be an option, it should be mandatory for all businesses. Here are a few tips for adding them to your site:

Generally putting SM icons in the upper right is the most widely accepted practice. The fallback should be in the footer if your design can’t handle the header. Always aim for header or footer as it’s become the “natural” place for people to look for them. It also depends on how highly you value a “follower” or a “like”. If gaining these are your main focus, you would not want to put your social media icons at the bottom of a 10 page scrolling blog. The flip side of this is that you risk the chance of taking someone off your site to your social media profile before passing through your content and being a potential customer/conversion.

Branding them (changing the colors/textures) to your site can be beneficial, overdoing it can also be detrimental and hide/blend them into your site too much.

Tagging articles, services or products with the ability to share through social media(facebook, twitter and linkedin) is a good way to gain followers and more exposure.

Adding Facebook’s “like” button to your website eliminates the middle man of having to actually visit Facebook to gain a follower, which is valuable if you’re goals are on your website. (Same for Twitter and LinkedIn)

When using Social Media Icon’s as links to your Social Media profiles make sure they open as a new window.

You can use plugins(if you’re on a CMS that supports them. Most themes in WP will come with SM icons integrated nowadays), for example: WordPress has a lot of them that will add it all in for you, you basically just have to place the widget or copy in a line of code. Here’s an example of one of those plugins: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social-media-widget/

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn allow you to generate their code for interactive “like”, “follow” and “recommend” buttons.

It can be worth utm tracking clicks on your sites Social Media Icons to see where visitors are falling off. Ie: are you getting 500 people clicking through to your Facebook pages, and only 20 people “liking” it. In this case this could be worth looking into your FB page itself. The flip side of that could be you are getting more “likes” then clicks, in which you most likely have bad placement of your SM icons on your website and they are finding your SM profiles through other means.

Some different examples of SM icon inclusion:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ has incorporated their social media icons and a “like” button into their main navigation, which basically tells us that they value those activities highly.

http://www.foxnews.com/ puts their SM icons in the right side of their footer with very little prominence. This placement is very common as it is a widget area for a lot of CMS’. It seems a trend for News organizations to bury their SM icons. CNN does put a Facebook feed on the right side of all their pages so you can repost articles quickly.

Like this:

Are you one of the 17 million WordPress powered blogs or websites out there? If so, have you done your part to optimize it? If you haven’t yet, do not fret. The following is a list of 5 fairly awesome WordPress plugins that can help simplify this process and boost your search results.

This plug-in can canonicalize your site or blog, add analytics tracking code, change your permalinks to readable urls and allow you to modify your title and meta tags. If you’re lazy they will even generate them for you!

Redirection is a WordPress plug-in to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation(which can be a huge hassle).

This plug-in allows you the option of linking pages to certain keywords or phrases residing on your website or blog. It also includes nofollow link options. No more need to manually tread through your website and set-up your internal anchor text!